Could MRAM Ultimately Replace DRAM? < PC World.in

Everspin on Wednesday said its MRAM magnetoresistive random access memory is trickling into products that require reliable, fast non-volatile memory that can preserve data in the event of a power failure.

Magneto-Resistive RAM in the news

I haven’t heard any product announcements in a while. But it appears Everspin is keeping the faith and shipping real products to real manufacturers. I couldn’t be happier that it’s now on the market and competing for some product designs head to head with RAM and Flash memory. But in this instance it’s really competing against a whole other main stream product; static RAM.

The so-called SRAM was always used as a high speed read mostly cache that allowed a good sized buffer to stay close to the CPU. Static RAM caches were the easiest (but maybe not most cost effective) way to bump the speed of any Motorola or Intel cpu during their co-domination of the desktop market (Intel 386 and Motorola 680000). Stick an SRAM between the CPU and the motherboard, and voila 10-15% performance increase versus a straight through connection between CPU and the motherboard. And static RAM much like Flash based memory chips could also be used to hold data resident for many days powered down. But the cost versus Flash makes it much less competitive. However MRAM can also be used where you might have used a static RAM in the past. Current manufacturers are using it in place of static RAM in hard drive Host Bus Adaptors. This is not just a cost savings but a material savings as these days it is more common to back any mission critical drive electronics with a super-capacitor.

With Magnetic RAMs you can skip including the super capacitor and let the persistence built-in to MRAM do the rest (no need for refreshes or write/re-writes in the background). It makes me wonder if you also went with a super-capacitor to back everything locally and a Magnetic RAM module as well how big a mess that might give them to manage. But from a risk management standing, how much extra or how much less risk would you incur using MRAM plus Super-capacitors in your Disk Controller? I’m sure the cost of manufacture might not warrant the extra effort, but it would still be cool to see a statistical analysis comparing this ‘belt and suspenders’ extravagant setup versus just MRAM or just Super-capacitors.